


The Eternal Symphony

by Maple



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, Music, Quickening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-29
Updated: 2011-03-29
Packaged: 2017-10-17 08:47:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maple/pseuds/Maple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia Jardine knows something nobody else does: the Quickening as symphony.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eternal Symphony

Waiting for Duncan to return, Claudia lounged on his couch. She’d been going over some sheet music, practicing it in her head, but now she’d finished. Slightly bored, and tired, she leaned back into the cushions and started daydreaming.

She glanced at the clock. Duncan was a few minutes late, but she wasn’t worried. He was paling around with his friend, Adam, and between the two of them, she was sure he couldn’t get into too much trouble from which he couldn’t extricate himself. As she rested, waiting to sense his signature, signaling he had returned, she mused on that sound.

Oh, how the noise had initially grated on her. It had been a headache sent straight from hell, as a torment. She’d held her head, crying out.

It had taken months, but now she was used to it, and lately she’d been focusing her perfect pitch attention at it. Given proper attention, the sound of it in her head had surprised her. At first blush, any single Immortal approaching sounded in her head like a mixture of the crush of gravel beneath heavy machinery and the wrenching and tearing of metal, flesh, vegetation, fabric…a soul. But when two or more came within her range at the same time---and here was the crux of it, for it had to be simultaneous–she began to sense the composition.

Each Immortal was but a series of notes unto themselves–discordant. But played together, each signature harmonized, becoming together more than any single lone instrument.

She had yet to catch the melody, for she was rarely in the company of other Immortals, and surely never more than two at a time. A few times now, both Duncan and Adam had returned to the loft in each other’s company and she had caught the most tantalizing hint of a cantata. For that was what she thought it might be. Deep in her center, it felt…somehow spiritual, and as diverse as the cosmos. An ode to wonder, and amazement.

Every immortal carried within them a strain of the music–a unique refrain, a single note, a part of the whole. By oneself the phrase was incomplete, harsh and jagged. Complete, together, how would the whole sound?

Perhaps…here she paused to grasp at the concept. Perhaps that is what the Gathering would be? A symphony. The complete and total harmonic music of all Immortals. Would it come together like the resonance of a bell, as a single pure, perfect note? Or as an infinitely variable symphony?

Would the world pause to listen?

Would it be the end of all things, or the beginning?

But there would be instruments missing, she suddenly remembered. The Game took care of that. It saddened her, to realize that parts of the whole would be missing–complete and entire components left out of the masterpiece.

She let the idea bump around in her head, testing it. Analyzing it. Could she be the only one who saw it? Did her musical genius give her the insight to finally understand the clues, when all others couldn’t even hear the possibilities?

Her mind tumbling, trying to remember every signature she’d ever heard, and futilely attempting to piece them together in her mind’s ear, she finally dozed.

Then, Claudia caught her breath suddenly. Duncan and Adam were back–and in her head she could just barely catch a fragment of the elusive, eternal music.


End file.
